The temper out there is quite remarkable, remarkably nasty to be precise. Our current election campaign is quite the nastiest I can ever remember, and anger seethes through the comments of even the most staid columns.

Britain is in the same spot with the battle over BREXIT —Britain’s upcoming vote over whether to exit the European Union or stay in. Only Britain has a scheduled vote, but there is plenty of rumbling in other European nations who are not happy with the influx of migrants, and the response of their governments. The future is uncertain and the people know it and are not pleased with the preparedness.

It’s hard for most Americans to imagine that they would choose to stay in. We’re not much on unelected government passing down laws to regulate our lives, and having no ability to even say ‘Hey Wait a minute! You can’t do that.’ Well, they can and do.

Bureaucrats are the same all over the world. They discover power and that, pushed for, there is no end to the power they can accrue to themselves. They start out intending to do right by the people, and end up establishing a dictatorship, and enriching themselves and their friends and relatives. When people start out promising hope and change, you’d better inquire a bit more deeply into exactly what they mean by the pretty slogans.

We were lucky to be founded by men brought up under English Common Law and the Magna Charta. and all too familiar with the Wars of Religion, but they were soon busy with trying to survive and build communities and deal with wild animals and the native people. A number of the earliest settlers returned to England to fight in the English Civil War with Oliver Cromwell.

In a world run mostly by the divine right of Kings, or Caliphs, or Sultans, or Czars — Democracy and Liberty were an enormous shock to the system, and few expected it to last. The French tried with their bloody Revolution, and ended up with the Napoleonic Wars.

It is particularly interesting then, that the Left, the radical Left, is so determined on eliminating democracy in the name of complete control. It is fairly clear when they want to send “deniers” to prison on RICO charges for disagreeing with their idea that global warming is a huge crisis, when they want to do away with the Second Amendment, as well as the rest of the Constitution, reject patriotism and its traditions — like the Pledge of Allegiance, support open borders and reject our immigration laws.

I have been startled at the way the leftist media speaks the same leftist ‘talking points’ all at once, in the same words with the same exact punctuation, but I never realized what I was seeing and hearing until I posted the video below about “It’s Just What ISIL Wants.” They do it all the time, and we don’t really notice. But that is a very different kind of journalism than we expect in a free country! You can think of dozens of different subjects in which they have tried to set the agenda by repetition of precisely the same words. That is not thought, nor is it journalism — who hands our the talking points? Think Progress?

We have a generation or two of ambitious youngsters who have signed on, not to accurately report events, but to put a label on things before the ordinary person has time to think it through — in the goal of changing the world. I can remember it being reported that the journalism schools were producing young reporters ambitious to change the world. I should have paid more attention. That is really the problem, isn’t it? We are just not paying close enough attention.

Pat Caddell was a long-time Democrat pollster and political consultant. He worked for Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Joe Biden and Jerry Brown. His analysis on polls and campaign issues has often put him at odds with the current leadership of the Democrat Party; and as he has become more conservative and criticizes Democrats, they like him less.

Democrats don’t like disagreement in the ranks. But Caddell is quite free with his criticism of Republicans as well. The odd thing is that Republicans don’t mind. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, and as he knows his way around politics intimately — he’s very interesting.

There were the shower heads, the low-flush toilets, and upcoming before we know it, will be the mandate to use only CFL (twisty) light bulbs. The latter is ostensibly to save energy, but the only reason to save energy is because of the government’s refusal to drill for oil or natural gas, and its war on coal all in the name of stopping a non-existent global warming and keeping CO2, a natural plant fertilizer, out of the atmosphere which is actually short of CO2.

Liberals are control freaks. They want to remove all annoyances from life — not things that annoy us, like government over-regulation, but things that annoy them. Mayor Bloomberg of New York and now Governor Schwarzenegger of California have banned trans-fats. The only problem is that there is no evidence whatsoever that trans-fats are harmful to anyone.

It’s time to shape up the American population. Attacks on fast food of any kind will continue. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act contains a little section requiring restaurants to disclose calorie counts on their menu boards. Envision Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Waxman and the others all sitting around a table in a backroom trying to decide just what to do about American obesity. Obviously they don’t often patronize fast food restaurants and have never seen the menu boards behind the counter.

Seems so simple. Just add nutritional information for each item on the menu. Picking a can at random from my pantry shelf, you have: Calories, Calories from fat. Total fat, Saturated fat, Trans fat, Cholesterol, Sodium, Total carbohydrates, Fiber, Sugars, and Protein, and then there are vitamins A and C, Calcium and Iron. On the back of my can, it takes up a space of about 1″ x 2″, and includes teeny tiny type. On a behind-the-counter menu board it all has to be easy to read from a distance. Details, details!

Can you spell l-i-t-i-g-a-t-i-o-n ? Does publishing caloric information constitute advertising? So you run up against the truth in advertising rules. Suppliers change frequently, does that mean doing the whole thing over? Can you take the supplier’s word for the information, or do you have to have each item tested yourself? When all these extra costs are added, can you still churn out innovative menu items? If you cannot raise the price of the food, where do you put the extra costs?

Democrats have no grasp of consequences. Actions always have consequences, and the consequences have consequences. Would anyone read the calories on the menu board? If they read them would that change their behavior? And what business is it of the government anyway. This is a huge bomb of mass economic destruction on an economy in the throes of a semi-permanent depression.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air talked the federal menu mandate over with a vice president of Davanni’s pizza chain in the Twin Cities. More lost jobs, reduced choices for customers, money that might have funded more jobs wasted, because political elites fail to understand that Americans are perfectly capable of seeking out such information for themselves.

Tea Parties, as I understand it, grew out of unsatisfying Town Hall meetings, and representatives who wouldn’t listen. People who had never demonstrated before, nor carried a sign joined with others who were similarly disturbed at excessive spending, and irresponsible congressmen.

Demonstrations began popping up all over the country, interest spread all over the internet. The Obama administration claimed to be unaware of the hundreds of thousands of people marching on the mall, and cleaning up after themselves like the nice responsible people they were.

Leftists have sneered and criticized, and recently anti-tea party groups have popped up in opposition. Joseph Abrams of Fox News has conducted a detailed investigation of the independent grassroots groups which have turned out to be part of “a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions and trickling slowly into political slush funds for Democrat activists.”

The biggest benefactor is AFSCME the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which donated $10 million to two front groups. Other unions are SEIU, Change to Win, Communications Workers of America, NEA, Teamsters, United Food & Commercial Workers and others.

Here’s how it works: What appears like a local groundswell is in fact the creation of two men — Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups, the non-profit election organizations that hammer on contentious issues (think Swift Boats, for example).

Varoga and Rakis keep a central mailing address in Washington, pulling in soft money contributions from unions and other well-padded sources to engage in what amounts to a legal laundering system. The money — tens of millions of dollars — gets circulated around to different states by the 527s, which pay for TV ads, Internet campaigns and lobbyist salaries, all while keeping the hands of the unions clean — for the most part.

“One of the groups created a web site,” says Daniel Foster, “TheTeaParty Is Over.org, dedicated to stopping tea partiers; attempts to, in its words “undermine…the legitimacy of the federal government in favor of a radical rightwing form of state’s rights,” and “Prevent their dangerous ideas from gaining a legislative foothold.”

Goodness, can’t have people out there with such radical ideas as cutting back on spending, or balancing the budget, or banning earmarks. That’s downright dangerous! What will those crazy radicals think of next?

Public Policy Polling is a Democratpolling outfit. That makes its newest survey looking at perceptions of ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News especially interesting. The survey found Fox as the only one that more people say they trust than distrust. 49% say they trust Fox to 37% who do not.

CNN does next best at a 39/41spread, followed by NBC at 35/44, CBS at 32/46, and ABC at 31/46. Ouch!

There is a lot of political polarization in which outlets people trust. 74% of Republicans trust Fox News, but no more than 23% trust any of the other four sources. For Democrats the numbers are a complete opposite — a majority trust all of NBC, CNN, ABC, and CBS while only 30% have faith in Fox News.

This indicates something about the post-partisan president who was going to bring us all together. Perhaps the White House vilification of Fox News demonstrated to the public that Fox wasn’t a Progressive patsy. Pandering and sycophantic coverage doesn’t sit well with the public.

This conforms with non-partisan studies that have found Fox to be the most centrist of the news outlets. Public Policy Polling is not happy with the results of their survey:

These numbers suggest quite a shift in what Americans want from their news. A generation ago Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in the country because of his neutrality. Now people trust Fox the most precisely because of its lack of neutrality. It says a lot about where journalism is headed.

Mark Steyn is always brilliant, sometimes he’s just more brilliant than usual. Today he pointed out the specific arrangements we have put in place to make sure that terrorist attacks were unlikely, because an alert citizenry was on the case. And yet, there was evidence that Major Nidal Hasan deserved attention:

You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK.” But we (that is to say, almost all of us — and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

“The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder,” Steyn said. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. George Casey, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a tragedy here.”

“Diversity” is more important than 14 dead, dozens wounded? That is undoubtedly not what he meant, but “diversity” is the ultimate meaningless politically correct notion.

If you have an African-American who immigrated 5 years ago from Ethiopia, and an African-American whose family has lived in America for 150 years, the important thing to them is the color of their skin? The latter person may have far more in common with someone whose origins were in Mexico, but who was also raised as an army brat. Mothers of toddlers care a lot more about playmates of the same age than their ethnicity.

The notion that what is important about a person is their race or ethnicity may result in checking off the right little boxes on a census questionnaire but has little to do with the lives of real people. Are those diversity numbers so important? When it comes to lawsuits, or publicity or promotions the checked-off boxes may matter. When counting boxes becomes more important than real people, political correctness does more damage than it is worth.

Planning a baby? Looking forward to bringing your first child home from the hospital? The 1,018 -page health care bill introduced by House Democrats has all sorts of bad policy ideas, and many of them are not even about health care. One very annoying provision calls for a home visitation program that would bring state workers into the homes of young families to improve “the well-being, health, and development of children.” How intrusive can you get!

Section 440 of the House bill —Home Visitation Programs for Families with Young Children and Families Expecting Children — would provide grants to states to establish home visitation programs to educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills. The “well-trained and competent staff” will:

…provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains..modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices; [and] skills to interact with their child…

Did I mention that Progressives are Control Freaks? Aside from the very, very questionable role of the federal government, the specifics of the bill are troublesome. The home visitation policy says that the state will “prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families or a high incidence of child maltreatment. It is described as “voluntary” but that may be just until the time the parent-trainer arrives.

The federal government doesn’t know diddly-squat about parenting success, but the home visitation would further increase the federal role in preschool education and child indoctrination.

That takes care of the babies. At the other end of life, the Congressional dimwits have written a provision (House bill, p. 425-430) that compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (or more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care.

Sessions cover things like whether to receive antibiotics and “the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration.” You can imagine the abuses that this provision invites. In Oregon, a man with terminal cancer was refused drugs that could have given him additional life as too expensive, but he was offered assisted suicide if he wanted it.

If you are diagnosed with cancer, you have a better chance of surviving it in America than in any other part of the world. The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. as number 1 out of 191 countries for providing timely treatment, a choice of doctors and for being responsive to patients needs. Pity the Progressives want to change all that in the name of getting control of your health care and you.